Doucet Fischer works in a wonderful place: the wood-paneled book-lined offices of the Pforzheimer Collection of the New York Public Library. Here’s a reminder from her about a funding opportunity specifically for advanced graduate students, junior faculty members, and independent scholars.

This blog offers me a new place to post information about the Keats-Shelley Association's Pforzheimer Grants, a program that was inaugurated in 1999. This initiative grew out of collective soul-searching about new directions the Association might take after the bicentennial era of the 90's, when we sponsored conferences celebrating the two-hundredth birthdays of Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Mary Shelley. For researchers, the Web acts as a candy-store window: the manuscript and book listings in the online catalogs of major libraries in the US and the UK are virtually right at hand, but the material objects are actually out of reach, often a pricey plane ticket away. And so, the KSAA board jumped at the idea of providing funds that would enable Ph.D. students, untenured faculty, and independent writers and scholars to pay for expenses related to their research. [cont'd]

So here’s the formal announcement:

The Keats-Shelley Association of America awards two annual Carl H. Pforzheimer Jr. Research Grants of $2,500 each to advanced graduate students, independent scholars, and untenured faculty members pursuing research on British Romanticism and literary culture between 1789 and 1832, with preference given to projects involving authors and subjects featured in the Keats-Shelley Journal Bibliography. The deadline is 1 November 2003. Further information and application forms may be obtained at:

Finally, a historical note about Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. (1907-1996), for whom the grants are named: He was the son of Carl H. Pforzheimer, Sr. (1879-1957), a bibliophile, investment banker, and philanthropist who amassed several collections: among them were bibles, incunables, children's books, fine press editions, books and manuscripts related to English and American literature ranging from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, as well as a large assemblage of material associated with British Romanticism. (Many readers will know the Romanticism Collection as the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, which was donated to The New York Public Library in 1986 by the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation.) Carl Pforzheimer, Jr., put the lie to the theory that acquired characteristics can't be inherited. He, too, was a bibliophile, investment banker, and philanthropist. He was also the steward of his father's collections, which he continued to augment, and the head of the family foundation that had (and still has, under the leadership of his son, Carl H. Pforzheimer III) a history of offering university presses support for scholarly publications related to the ever-widening Shelley circle. In addition, Carl Jr. served as the long-time president and generous patron of the Keats-Shelley Association of America. To honor his multifaceted contributions to the study of the authors and subjects covered in The Keats-Shelley Journal, the Association's board named the Grants in his honor.